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MUSIC; A 'Smooth Operator' Unswayed By Fashion

LOVERS ROCK,'' the first collection of new songs in eight years by Sade, is, like all her records, immaculate: slickly played, exquisitely arranged midtempo mood music that leaves nothing to chance.

During her a wildly successful 16-year career, this Nigerian-born, London-reared chanteuse has refined an aesthetic of impeccability. The perfection begins with Sade herself -- at 41, still one of the most beautiful people in pop -- and extends to songs that are the musical equivalent of a Wallpaper magazine photo spread: there is a chilly white-on-white pristineness in their diminished chords, mild funk rhythms and coolly drifting melodies. Sade's most recent American performances, on her 1993 tour, looked as much like Armani catwalk shows as pop concerts. She took the stage in a spangled white skirt and halter-top; her band mates Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale and Paul Spencer Denman had impossible, deep tans, waxed mustaches and smartly cut navy blue suits. Together, the band was a picture of Eurotrash flawlessness, every inch the jet-setting ''smooth operators'' described in Sade's 1984 breakthrough single -- cosmopolitans born to adorn the terrace of a Milanese cafe.

Rock-minded music critics are suspicious of pop smoothies; they detect something phony in songs as neatly assembled and brightly polished as Sade's. Her five previous albums have sold 40 million copies, earned her a worldwide following and left a subtle imprint on everything from R-and-B balladeering to the stoned, slow-smoldering grooves of trip-hop. But Sade's critical reception, though always respectful, has been a tad tepid. Her music is easy on the ears; often, it hovers just on the other side of easy listening. Critics tend to reach for the alarm button when they hear songs that veer this close to the elevator.

Yet Sade is, in her way, a paragon of musical authenticity and other virtues that critics hold dear. She is an individualist who has honed a trademark sound and remained supremely indifferent to musical trends. Most of the female singers who have achieved comparable longterm success have stayed on the charts by staying breathlessly a la mode: poaching styles from clubland, teaming up with this year's star producer, overhauling their looks. Madonna apparently relies on her gay friends to keep her up on new sounds and on a battery of stylists to keep her looking the part. Sade has a muse of her very own; her pulled-back hairdo hasn't changed once in a decade and a half.

Sade's old-fashioned dedication to music, just music, has paid off in an old-fashioned way: she's been getting better at what she does. Her 1992 album, ''Love Deluxe,'' was a pretty, surprisingly brawny record that stripped away a lot of the cocktail jazz fussiness of earlier efforts. ''Lovers Rock'' (Epic EK85185), which arrived in stores last week, is leaner still, and lovelier. The sound is high-gloss, but gone are the lapses in taste, the queasy saxophone solos and other Muzak moments; Sade has taken the schlock out of her shellac. The result is by far her best record.

Sade's gentle, husky singing voice is one of the more distinctive in pop. The heart of her range is a good deal lower than that of most female vocalists, a sultry purr that has made her songs perennial slow-jam favorites. (Other stars rule the dance floor, but Sade long ago staked a claim to that final musical frontier of a night on the town: the bedroom.) Over the years, Sade's voice has become a more agile instrument. On ''Lovers Rock'' she hits rumbling low notes and swoops into a feathery upper register; she rasps and burrs and croons multitracked harmony parts over tense two-chord vamps.

Unlike most pop divas, Sade is a songwriter, and she sings like one. Turn on Top 40 radio: what you'll probably hear is not singing but an athletic event -- pop prima donnas hurtling across octaves and competing to turn the most rococo melismatic backflips. Sade sings with delicacy and restraint, determined to stay within a song and communicate its meaning. The almost lullabylike quality of her vocal on ''By Your Side,'' the new record's first single, perfectly suits the song's lyrics, which offer gentle assurances to a worried lover. Sade's sole accompaniment on the gospel-inflected ''It's Only Love That Gets You Through'' is murmuring piano and organ.

A showier singer might have seized this opportunity to strut her shatter-the-stained-glass prowess; Sade delivers the song in a ghostly near whisper. It's the right choice.

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Listeners who know only Sade's big hits -- ''Smooth Operator,'' ''The Sweetest Taboo,'' ''Paradise'' -- may be startled by the starkness and sturdiness of ''Lovers Rock.'' The sound is intimate: in nearly every song, you hear fingers scraping across the fret-boards of closely miked acoustic guitars. The album's beats are spare but hardy; several songs swathe percussion in reverb and treat it with digital delay, creating a woozy, dub reggaelike psychedelic effect. Some songs are downright rugged. ''Flow'' pushes Sade's voice out in front of brooding acoustic guitar arpeggios and blunt snare hits; a meticulously constructed swirl of canned beats, plinking keyboards and strings turns the beautifully observed character sketch ''Immigrant'' into the toughest, bluest thing Sade has recorded.

''Lovers Rock'' feels like a perfectly natural progression in Sade's music; this is no bandwagon-jumping stab at a new sound. Sade, it's worth noting, is not just a singer: it's also the name of her four-member band. Mr. Matthewman, Mr. Hale, Mr. Denman and the woman born Helen Folasade Adu began playing together nearly 20 years ago in the Latin funk group Pride. The London musical milieu from which they emerged is one of the world's most rootless and multicultural, and the band has felt free to fuse a variety of influences into its own musical alloy. If ''Lovers Rock'' sounds familiar, and thoroughly contemporary, it's not because Sade has suddenly capitulated to musical fashion: it's because musical fashion has caught up with Sade. Million-selling neo-soul stars like Erykah Badu and Maxwell are in Sade's debt; so are hipster darlings like Portishead, Everything but the Girl and Morcheeba.

While Sade's sonic palate has gradually evolved, her lyrical concerns have stayed fixed. On one of the new record's sprightlier numbers, she sings, ''It's all about our love.'' Indeed it is: there is something of Astrud Gilberto in Sade's cool, melancholic crooning, but her true models are Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf; she is a defiant, wounded, hopeless romantic. Sade had a big hit in 1988 with ''Love Is Stronger Than Pride,'' and most of the new songs -- ''Somebody Already Broke My Heart,'' ''All About Our Love,'' ''The Sweetest Gift,'' ''King of Sorrow,'' ''It's Only Love That Gets You Through'' -- are variations on that theme. In the hands of a lesser songwriter, the lovey-dovey melodrama might get tedious, but Sade is a skillful lyricist; she skirts close to cliches but manages to alight on the telling, touching image.

''You are the lover's rock/ The rock that I cling to,'' she sings on the record's title track. ''You're the one I swing to in a storm.''

Sade is a pop diva, of a sort; but the qualities that define her divadom -- elegance, subtlety, mystery -- are not those enshrined by VH1's ''Divas Live'' specials. She doesn't project campy egotism: no big head, no big hair.

The paparazzi rarely catch her at celebrity parties or trendy nightclubs; she has never confided in journalists about her love life. Her disinterest in playing the media game has earned her a Garboesque reputation: she is seen as pop music's mysterious, imperious recluse. (Even the correct pronounciation of her name -- sharDAY -- was a bit of a mystery at first.)

Yet the truth is that we know Sade a great deal better than some of her less ''reclusive'' peers. We know about Madonna's yoga habit and new London town house; we know about Whitney Houston's rocky marriage and Mariah Carey's divorce. But what does their music tell us about these divas? Try to locate a musical personality in Madonna's mercurial recordings. It's a tough task. What is there to discover in the roof-rattling songs of those showboats, Ms. Houston and Ms. Carey? Nothing but ego. Over the course of Sade's exceptionally consistent and original recording career, we have gotten to know her. It is that familiar musical personality, ever beguiling, which glows against the burnished background of ''Lovers Rock,'' and it's an acquaintance worth renewing.